SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Let me tell you about Gabriel Dax. He's a Cold War-era travel writer who goes all over the world. That nicely positions him to also be a British secret agent. But he also gets envelopes of cash from the KGB, which MI6 thinks is just fine - keeps his cover. British intelligence sends Gabriel to Guatemala on a friendly errand for the CIA, but the trip has an unforeseen, lethal result. And that will pluck a wire inside Gabriel when he's sent to West Berlin to find termites - traitors in spy slang - shortly before the visit of President John F. Kennedy.
"The Predicament" is the second novel in a planned Gabriel Dax trilogy by William Boyd, the honored British novelist, who joins us now from London. Thanks so much for being with us.
WILLIAM BOYD: Great to be here, Scott. Thank you.
SIMON: This is the second book in the trilogy, as we said. Is Gabriel by now more of a spy than a travel writer?
BOYD: Yes. Reluctantly so, I think. He's discovered he's actually quite good at the job. He has resources and he has instincts that actually suit his spying life, but he's constantly moaning about how it's taking him away from his real life as a writer. But he's getting in deeper and deeper.
SIMON: There's cash payments he takes from the KGB, with permission. Does he declare them on his tax filings with Inland Revenue?
BOYD: I suspect not. He's instructed by his mysterious and alluring MI6 handler, Faith Green, to spend the money very obviously. So he's bought a cottage. He's bought a motorbike. He's buying paintings. He's just profiting from this, as you said, KGB cover that he has. He's meant to be a termite, a mole himself. But of course, it gets extra complicated.
SIMON: And let me ask you about his relationship with his handler - and that phrase becomes a little fraught - from British intelligence, Faith Green. They're - they can also be involved, can't they?
BOYD: Yes. I mean, there is a - an emotional dimension to their relationship, as well as a professional one. And in fact, it's not too much to say that Gabriel is smitten by Faith. And she rather exploits that, though I think she also enjoys the dalliance. But there's an - always a sort of worry that somehow things are not what they seem. And I think Gabriel's life can be described as a persistent erosion of trust, and it makes him more and more anxious.
SIMON: Gabriel meets with a Guatemalan trade union leader and a former priest known as Padre Tiago, and the padre expects to get a message from Gabriel from Fidel Castro. Gabriel doesn't have any such messages. This a lapse or intentional?
BOYD: No, it's a setup. Gabriel's being used because Padre Tiago, who might win the next presidential election, is in hiding, and the powers that be that don't like him want to know where he is. In fact, Gabriel is a kind of - he's a lure, in a way, to find out where Padre Tiago is hiding. He thinks he's going to interview Padre Tiago. But in fact, there's a far more nefarious objective underway, and it has a bad outcome.
SIMON: The story moves on to West Germany, following that thread from Guatemala. The CIA does seem to have a case against President Kennedy, don't they?
BOYD: I am a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the assassination of JFK, but it depends what conspiracy you choose. There are various possible explanations. But my theory, which I outline in more detail in the novel, is that there were rogue elements of the CIA - discontented operatives, particularly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. One forgets that JFK and Bobby Kennedy were not universally popular at the time. And the whole Guatemala issue is to do with regime change and destabilization in Central America, which the CIA were heavily involved with, with the Mafia as well. So I take these elements that are there as potential explanations of what happened and stitch them together to make a - in my opinion, quite a convincing conspiracy about how JFK was assassinated.
SIMON: Is that a literary exercise for you, or what?
BOYD: Yes. It's a literary exercise because I'm a realistic novelist, and I want the worlds of my novels, which are fictional, to be as authentic and as plausible as possible. And throughout my fiction over the years, I've always introduced real events, historical events, real historical people in order to give it that kind of ring of truth or to make the reader sometimes think - is this true, or is this something that Boyd has made up? I like that doubt to be implanted in the reader's mind.
SIMON: What's it like to spend so much time in the 1960s for you?
BOYD: The 1960s coincided pretty much with my teenage years, and so I have vivid memories of them and vivid memories of the events that took place. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember the assassination of JFK. And so when - revisiting them for these novels is a kind of time travel for me. When I talk about the clothes people wore, the drinks they drank, the meals they ate, I'm tapping into my own memories of that period. And it's - you know, it is a long time ago now, but it's still very vivid to me. And it's a perfect place, perfect time to set a spy novel because the Cold War was at its height and the good guys and the bad guys were, in theory, clearly defined.
SIMON: I figured out while reading this novel you and I are the same age, within days of each other.
BOYD: Oh, right. Right.
SIMON: And we've both grown up with the character of the suave British spy.
BOYD: Yes.
SIMON: Why has that lasted so much? Let me tell you my theory, OK?
BOYD: OK.
SIMON: All right. Ian Fleming and some other people needed to make up something following, you know, Britain's darkest days, in which they prevailed, but they wanted to be back on top of the world. Hence 007.
BOYD: Yes, but I think you've got to separate 007 from the more serious spy novels. My theory is that one of the few things we British are good at is betraying our country. And we...
SIMON: Well, the Cambridge Five, you're thinking.
BOYD: Yeah, the Cambridge...
SIMON: Yeah.
BOYD: ...Five. And I think the obsession with spying and spy novels is to do with this notion, particularly in World War II and postwar, Cold War, the fact that we had so many traitors at the heart of our establishment. And they were well-educated, middle-class, privileged people. I mean, Kim Philby, the superspy, was a Soviet double agent at the heart of MI6 for over 20 years. And I think that's where the - if you like, the suavity comes in, that it's not some guy with a grudge. These are privileged people who intellectually decide to work for the Russians, and that's an abiding fascination. And I don't think anybody has fully explained why these men consistently and for such a long time were traitors.
SIMON: William Boyd's new novel, "The Predicament," and there's another one to come. Thanks so much for being with us.
BOYD: Great to be here. Thank you very much, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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